From: Cooking in a Coffee Pot stories from the road
Minneapolis, December 13, 2011
It is a sacrilegious Saturday in the Café of the poor. At the crossroads of America in the temple of clowns, hard plastics and refillable soft drinks. I’ve been sitting here for two days now, and it is eleven degrees outside and colder still, in the heart of America. I sit here with my computer, and I watch them as they come and go.
I’m right across the street from a public library, but for some reason the Internet connection there is poor. Probably, for the same reason, the Internet connection is poor in the house where I’m staying, a technical issue better known as monopoly. A citywide contract guarantees revenue and poor service. In prime hours, you can barely send an E-mail without being bumped off the server, so here I sit in the Café of the poor.
Already, I’ve met some of the regulars. I have not yet become one of them, but I feel as if I will, that I must. There’s Stan. He’s in his early thirties and he buys and sells comic books online and he talks too much. He can’t help himself; he’s just trying to be friendly and trying to overcome his own loneliness. Last night, a man named Ross was making calls on his cell phone and began striking up conversations. He finally made his way around to me and it was clear he’d been drinking when he explained he was looking for a ride to an AA meeting.
The elderly come in to read the newspaper and drink coffee. The teenagers come just to hang out. It’s a half-way house for them, too old for happy meals and not yet ready for senior coffee. Young couples come to rent mainstream movies from the Red Box machine, that homogenizer of American entertainment. The lowest common denominator come to life as an oversize red vending machine. The sights and sounds of this place take on a surreal quality as the alarms for French fries and hot apple pies ring out against a background noise of canned music and cell phone conversations.
There comes a constant stream of fathers with their small children in tow, inhabiting these pews. They’re seeking communion with their own lost children. They share the sacrament of the happy meal, while trying desperately to fill in the empty spaces and missing time.
You can tell a lot about folks by their clothes, especially in this northern latitude. Some come wearing new designer North Face coats or even furs. Others come here in ragged clothes and carry bundles with bedrolls slung across their backs. They’re men and women in fatigues who are fighting off the cold and fighting for survival in the cold winter of a cold land. One man, observing such an individual, said, “It must be tough living your life out of three duffel bags. That’s a hell of a lifestyle.”
I answered a lifestyle is a choice, and no one chooses to live in poverty. The poor come here because the food is cheap, and the air is warm. They find themselves here and they find each other here. I heard a daughter ask her elderly mother in a loud voice, so the elderly woman could hear, “What have you been doing with yourself this week, Mother?
I felt it was somewhat of an absurd and detached question. I mean, to ask a frail and elderly woman. Remind me when I’m that age to answer, “Oh, I’ve been playing handball and touch football.” It was an absurd question to ask in this palace of Corporate America. A land of the absurd, this twisted Main Street in this twisted, bent, crumbling and inverted land.
Above it all; in the center of this twisted Main Street of the absurd. You’ll find Orwell’s Big Brother television, chiming on and fucking on. Above the noise above the fray and the fry pots, Fox News is aired around the clock. It is the most absurd of all of the absurdities, because from my tiny time here nobody seems to be watching. Yet it drones on almost completely un-noticed by anyone. Like Big Brother himself, it is not here to be judged, but only to remind us he is here.
It is not without some effect, however. As yesterday an old man was discussing politics with his friend and feared, “if Obama gets re-elected and gets a majority in the Senate, he will become like a dictator.” If he gets to name another Supreme Court Justice, he’ll pick another liberal and then all bets are off. It will be the end of America as we know it.”
It’s hard not to laugh, even though it’s not funny. But where I wonder, do you suppose the old man got those ideas from?
It is also hard to remain quiet. You feel yourself compelled to ask, who are these mythical liberals of whom you speak? Barney Frank? The man who did away with the government mortgage market, as we know it? Barney Frank, the man who untied the final mooring of the Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and turned the American mortgage buyer over to the private hands of Mr. Potter’s monopoly, that liberal?
Or maybe, he means that liberal Barrack Obama. The Barack Obama who continued George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s wars? That liberal Obama, who sided with the Republicans against the labor unions and who sided with the oil companies, against the environment? Or perhaps, he means that liberal Sonia Sotomayor. That liberal Supreme Court Justice nominee, who was also on John McCain’s short list, for a Supreme Court appointment. The same liberal Sotomayor, who decided 86 percent of her court decisions in favor of corporations and against the public. God forbid, that Obama should nominate any other such liberals. Sotomayor was so liberal that Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal called her “a fine choice.”
You can’t argue down this twenty-four-hour propaganda, especially in the palace of the corporate kings and in the sepulcher of American dysfunction. And even though the sound is turned down, it can still be heard. The programming is closed captioned for the intelligence impaired. A Fox news poll asks, “Who really creates jobs?” They set them up just so they can knock them down. When Fox News promotes a poll question, it is to enlighten the management and not the huskers in the hustings. It is their metric, as to how well the propaganda drip is sinking in with the suckers.
Fox is making a lot of noise about civil unrest in Moscow, with little news about civil unrest being broken up by police in this country. It is as it is, and what it is, is no different than the Völkischer Beobachter, which loosely translated means “The People’s Observer.” But it was an Orwellian inversion of observing the people after applying the chloroform to the actual news.
It took me a while to figure it out. What exactly does this all mean? Then it came to me. This is the true Fourth Reich. This is where Ward Churchill’s” little Eichmann’s” go for lunch. This is where parents bring their children to indoctrinate them to the sound of a stick hitting the side of a swill bucket. These are children of the New Order; these are Pavlov’s children. This place…this temple of corporate ugliness has become the living embodiment of America itself. It is a triage unit and a trauma ward. A senior center and a benign corporate Hitler youth group. It is everything, but it’s nothing, like America herself; all of it. All of it, all of its promises are promises made for the express purpose of selling you something and selling you nothing but a load of more and more crap.
From “This Carbon- Based Life” Cooking in a Coffee Pot True stories from four years on the road $19.95 usd
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